Is Bayside High Literally Zack Morris’ Personal Heaven? A Fan Theory
The world of Bayside High doesn’t make a lot of sense. That’s because it’s an early ‘90s teen sitcom, and a particularly mindless one even by those standards. But it’s pretty hard to explain in the context of the fictional universe why, say, characters are constantly winking in and out of existence and the protagonist has the power to stop time. This isn’t a magical fantasy world where such events would be commonplace; it’s just a normal Southern California high school, and nobody ever even acknowledges it happens.
One way to look at it, and we did in 2012, is that it actually is a fantasy world — specifically, Zack Morris’. It’s the only way to explain how he went from junior high loser in Indiana, as portrayed in the Saved By the Bell precursor Good Morning, Miss Bliss, to Bayside’s big man on campus. (Oh, and, you know, the superpowers.)
One fan believes, however, that Zack Morris actually died at the conclusion of Good Morning, Miss Bliss and Saved by the Bell is a chronicle of his personal afterlife. The key is in another series entirely:
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(Warning: This video gets very naked and very dead very fast.)
Writing for Thought Catalog, Rob Fee noticed that the spiral drawn on Dora Lange’s body at the beginning of True Detective was bizarrely similar to those that appear in the opening credits of Saved By the Bell. We all dismissed them as radical but meaningless squiggles, but those spirals carry deep significance on True Detective and more generally in ancient religions, symbolizing the cycle of life and death. Then there’s the accompanying theme song. It describes a harried student rushing out into the streets “just in time to see the bus fly by,” at which point the song becomes purely hypothetical, with no mention of alternate transportation.
It kinda sounds like the bus might have “flown by” the top of his body, and those bells he was saved by are more biblical than previously believed.
From that perspective, everything makes sense. Zack moves to California and somehow brings his best friends along and his divorced parents are magically back together because that’s what he’s always wanted. He’s “the star of the basketball team in one episode, yet we never hear about it again,” then a budding rock star, then class president, because “his mind is going through his wildest dreams and once they’ve been accomplished, it’s on to another dream,” Fee explained.
His relationships are the same way. “Look at how one dimensional each of his dates have been,” Fee continues, noting that the girls in Zack’s life tend to be archetypal and disappear without explanation. “It was simply his mind cycling through what he thought would be a fun love interest.”
If we go back to the theme song, in which it’s suggested that an assignment handed in tomorrow “will be alright,” he may not even know that he’s dead. We may need to bring in another ‘90s icon: Haley Joel Osment.
